For many, too many, Portuguese, Lisbon is Portugal. They will put up with much misery in the provinces so long as Lisbon has fine shops and streets and squares. The ambition of the peasant is to see Lisbon, and many prefer to live, however wretchedly, as citizens of that great city than quietly at their ease in the country. The rich inhabitants inhabit Paris, or else, as in the days of Garrett, “spend their lives between the Chiado and the Rua do Oiro,” although the motor-car now lures many from the clubs of the Rua Garrett and the cafés of the Rocio at least as far afield as Cintra or the Estoris. Rua Garrett is now the official name (after the poet Almeida-Garrett, 1799-1854), but it remains the Chiado in common speech. Its name derived probably from the name, or rather from the nickname, of another poet, Antonio Ribeiro, o Chiado. He was a popular sixteenth-century Lisbon poet, and lived in a house just off this street: it is thought that the frequent phrase “Vámos ao Chiado” (“Let us go and see Chiado”) led to the name being given to the street, hitherto called Rua direita das Portas de Santa Catharina. The quaint lift which suspends people like the mediaeval Virgil in a basket over the city, and, like some of the other eight ascensores, gives a splendid view, still has the words written up at its Largo de São Julião entrance: “Ao Chiado.”

Lisbon, on its seven hills, has so few level spaces that people naturally congregate, as water runs down from a mountain-side, in the district between the Rocio and the river, appropriately called the Baixa, the Low Quarter, and meeting between acquaintances is more frequent than in any other capital city. The splendid Avenida da Liberdade has never become popular, and is apt to be deserted except on special occasions, a great review or some Republican anniversary. It seems to be too far from the centres of gossip: before you had walked from the Praça dos Restauradores (i.e., the liberators of Portugal from Spain in 1640) to the Praça do Marquez de Pombal and back a ministry might have fallen. Best keep on the safe side and miss nothing of the human comedy which in Lisbon has centred in the Rocio throughout the centuries. Here there is continual movement by day and night. Lisbon sits up late and is an extremely late riser. Three o’clock on a June morning sees the last revellers in the streets, and, later, at an hour when other cities have put on their best clothes, dust-bins still line the pavements, and the rag-pickers are at their work.

Lisbon’s streets, spick and span, at least all those that the passing tourist will see, give no idea of the accounts of all writers a century ago, who in prose and verse agreed about the dirt and nastiness of the town. Indeed, so late as 1835 the suggestions of a Portuguese writer for the improvement of the city give some idea of its condition. It will be forbidden, said he, to break in horses in the streets. It will be forbidden to kill or singe pigs in the streets, or keep them alive in the streets, or tied to the doors, “for all these things annoy the inhabitants.” Dead animals were not to be left lying in the streets. He noted, too, the number of stray dogs, the beggars at every step, the filthiness of the outer staircases of the houses.[25] Some of the staircases had deep wells beneath them—there was one at No. 17 rua da Prata, 19 palmos deep.[26] The great houses had several, as also the convents; indeed, there is a doleful history of how the Prioress fell into one of these on a moonless night; however, she was fished out next morning, and it was regarded as a miracle that her clothes were perfectly dry, not even the sabots which she was wearing showing any sign of water.

But the wisest inhabitants of Lisbon sent and send their servants and negro slaves to the public fountains or buy the water brought thence by the aguadeiros who may be seen barrel on shoulder in all the narrow streets of the high-lying districts. The water of many of these fountains is reputed to have special virtues, as formerly the “fountain of the horses of New Street,” taken before sunrise, miraculously healed diseases of the eyes, and the same water “has the secret property of speedily fattening the horses that drink of it, and it would do the same to men if they went to drink of it at the fountain.” Carrying heavy bilhas of water up Lisbon’s steep and narrow streets is so arduous a business that the poorest inhabitants prefer to pay a tiny sum to the aguadeiro, and in a country where wine is often almost as common as water the qualities of the various waters are discussed with perhaps greater keenness than those of wines. In the sixteenth century the number of water-sellers is given as twenty-six.

Many houses, chiefly in the newer parts of the city, are entirely covered outside with azulejos, mostly green or blue, which give them a cool and cleanly appearance. The rooms inside, too, often have a pattern of azulejos several feet high round the walls, and their use should be more common in all hot countries. The low-lying part of Lisbon between the Rocio (sometimes called Rolling Motion Square or Turkey Square) and the Terreiro do Paço or Praça do Commercio (Black Horse Square) was rebuilt in parallel straight streets after the earthquake of 1755. These streets seem narrow enough now, and the united breadth of them would fit into the Avenida da Liberdade, but for the days of the Marquez de Pombal their plan had a certain grandeur. They still keep in some measure their distinctive characters, the Rua da Prata abounding in the shops of silversmiths, the Rua Augusta in tailors and linendrapers. From the Rocio, besides these links with Black Horse Square, goes the steep Rua do Carmo, with more fashionable shops, leading to the Chiado, and on the opposite side is the great market-place of the Praça da Figueira.

Thither through the night carts drawn by single oxen rumble slowly in, laden with vegetables from the country, the white hanging street-lamps lighting up the lordly pyramids of cabbages or turnips or tomatoes while regateiras (market women, also called collarejas, from Collares) carry in great baskets on their heads, and may be seen resting at dawn on the pavement outside the market. Indeed, it is one of the charms of Lisbon that beneath all its cosmopolitanism it has succeeded in retaining a certain rustic air. The servant-girl in one of M. Anatole France’s books, who came back well pleased with her first day in Paris: elle avait vu de beaux navets, would be enchanted with Lisbon. There the flat open baskets of vegetables balanced by men on their shoulders at either end of a thick pole—a truly tremendous burden, but perhaps they are gallegos, the porters of Lisbon, who stand cord over shoulder at the street corners—and the brimming panniers of donkeys give a freshness to the streets.

Morning and evening the milkman drives his cows through the streets with the most melodious and delightful of chants. Or the seller of maize bread cries his broinhas de milho quentinhas. In May come the strawberries: morangos de Cintra, followed through the summer months by a legion of melon-sellers, criers of grapes and all manner of fruit as the heat increases. Some kind of fruit is ever to be had in plenty: in winter handcarts of oranges and pineapples; or a man carries a rosary of great pineapples hanging from a pole. And year in, year out, go the varinas, the women of Ovar, bare-footed, with their gold ornaments and stiffly falling skirts, crying their fish; the sellers of newspapers; and the lotteryman (cauteleiro) with his perpetual litany of figures and his warning that “to-morrow the wheel goes round: Amanhã anda a roda.” The cries are nearly always soft and musical, very different from the piercing street-cries of Madrid or Barcelona.

There comes a time, about the end of July, when Lisbon is like Oxford in vacation. The glory is departed, and here there is no secondary reflected splendour of besundayed scouts to take its place. The smart carriages and motor-cars are few and far between, the steady flow of the well-dressed and fashionable passing up and down the Rua do Carmo, the Chiado, the Rua Nova de Almada, the Rua de S. Nicolau, and the Rua do Oiro, dries up like the summer streams. Then lemons and dark red bilhas of water are carried about the streets, here a woman bears on her head over a kerchief of deepest blue flowing to her waist a flat basket of long light green water-melons, or a great mound of white and purple grapes. Or perhaps in the sultry evening from some doorway sounds the sluggish and persistent Quem da mais, mais, mais, of the auctioneer at a long drawn-out leilão, as if the whole world were ending in a slow desolate agony. It is a cry so different from, yet as melancholy as, the Ho vitrier of the itinerant glazier in some village of the French Alps in autumn before the first heavy snows cut off its communications with the plain.

But with the autumn in Lisbon cheerfulness returns. From Bussaco and Cascaes and Cintra, the Estoris and Buarcos and Caldas da Rainha, from Paris and foreign and Portuguese watering-places, come the sun-browned veraneantes. There is a fresh vigour in the streets, the first autumn violets are sold, the chestnut-seller with his smoking baskets chants his Castanhas quentes e boas. Donkeys are driven through the streets with panniers of olives fresh from the country, and a little later droves of turkeys stalk through the Rocio undeterred from their leisured dignity by all the embarrassing trams and taxis. The inner meaning of castanha in Portuguese is “restoration”; violets were the emblems of Napoleon’s return from Elba: so that everything points to the coming of King Sebastian on one of those quiet autumn mornings when the hot sun does not pierce till midday through the thick mists enveloping the Tagus, and the fishing boats pass down-stream silent and invisible. The author of Costume of Portugal[27] refers to Lisbon’s chestnut-roasters: “women who are seen at the corner of almost every street in Lisbon. While the chestnuts are roasting a few grains of salt are thrown over them, which gives them a down similar to the bloom on a plumb fresh gathered.” We may take the bloom of the plumb with a grain of their salt, but still in the winter months women are to be seen sitting in nearly every doorway of the humbler streets fanning their glowing earthenware pots of shape exactly the same as that used in illustration of the letter F (Fogareiro) in João de Barros’ alphabet (1539).

If stress is here laid on these rustic traits as one of Lisbon’s great attractions to the foreigner, it must not of course be thought that it is not endowed with all the luxuries and refinements of a great modern city. There they all are, the good hôtels, streets neatly paved and scrupulously clean, the comfortable motor-cars and carriages, the tempting shop-windows, and a good service of electric tramcars, in an endless rosary of white and yellow. The service of motor-cars can scarcely be called good. Most of the cars are comfortable, and some of the drivers efficient, but the drivers of others sprawl lazily in the Rocio, only waking up to charge an excessive fare, which frightens away most people. Even if they have a taximeter, it starts at a shilling (250 réis) and reaches 1,000 réis with a strange rapidity. And if they have inveigled some unwary person into becoming their fare and prey—they, of course, consider all foreigners fair prey—he will find himself being conveyed at breakneck pace in a totally wrong direction. Indeed, the foreigner driven furiously in a Lisbon taxi may think that the lisboeta sets more value on time than on life, but in fact their attitude to time is rather that of the madrileño driver who, if asked to drive faster, will gradually slow down, stop, get down, open the door, take off his hat, and ask if you wished for anything. He will keep his politeness, even if you miss your train. All the sadder is it that in Lisbon the inroad of foreign customs tends to interfere with the pleasant dilatory habits of the native. Few shops, for instance—one or two chemists or booksellers at the most—have a little circle of chairs for their clients (freguezes) to pass the time in leisurely cavaco. But centuries of progress have failed to make Lisbon uninteresting, so various are the ingredients of its motley population, men of all nations, classes and religions. Saloios, i.e., peasants from the neighbourhood of Lisbon, are noticeable in the streets for their short “Eton jackets” and close-fitting trousers spreading out over the foot, and peasants from further afield, beyond the Tagus for their immensely wide (desabado) hats and their sackcloth coloured cloaks reaching in a succession of capes to the feet. And emigrants with their many-coloured patchwork alforges and their coffin-shaped trunks haunt the quays.

Along the Tagus are more markets of fruits and vegetables and fish, and vessels of every description, from the fishing-boat to the great Atlantic liner, are continually loading and unloading. Above and between the masts of the boats show the many-coloured dresses of fishwives and peasants, while a multitude of snow-white seagulls rise and fall, rise and fall against the turquoise blue of the river. Beyond lies Barreiro, with its cork factories, the banks of the Tagus rise abruptly, and on a clear day lordly Palmella (from which the palmellão wind blows across the Tagus), perched on its lofty crag, gleams from the dark serra. The passing traveller has, even without landing, a magnificent view of city and harbour. But Lisbon has many more intimate beauties which demand a longer study, and would provide an artist with work for months and years. Especially in winter the colouring is often very exquisite, with tints subdued and delicate, as, for instance, on a stormy day the grey irregular roofs with their crops of fresh green grass seen in some steep travessa against the dark indigo of the river or hills beyond; or some glimpse of ruined Carmo or crumbling Alfama set in relief by a sky of limitless clear blue. The old tiled roofs, warped and curving, are a perpetual delight. Sometimes they have grass in straight furrows between the rows of tiles like springing corn, or they are covered by a more continuous carpet of mosses, or even are gay with the flower of hawksweed. It depends largely on the rain. Two or three months of continuous rain in winter brings them to a high perfection. Summer is the great weeder in Portugal: it robs both roofs and cobbled squares of their pleasant green. Alfama from a distance has the look of a tumble-down fishing-village above the Tagus. At close quarters it is found to be an intricate maze of streets so narrow that they never let in the sun, and a man’s stretched-out arms touch either wall, and so steep that they are built often in the form of stairs. Equally picturesque is the district of Santa Catharina, on the other side of the city. The marvellously steep streets and stairways going down from the Calçada do Combro to the river are full of quaint surprises worthy of the wynds of Edinburgh. Narrow stone staircases lead round and down and down, apparently nowhither, small yards and terraces struggle manfully to keep their balance as level spaces, here and there a palm or a vine or an orange-tree gives a touch of green. The principal descending streets are several yards in width. Rows of bright-coloured clothes perpetually a-drying are projected on poles from either side, and beneath these motley banners is a succession of tiny stifling black shops. The steps are strewn with rubbish and with cats and children innumerable. Sometimes from a doorway comes a smell of burnt rosemary or other scented brushwood used to light the kitchen fire, and bringing with it saudade of the life in Portuguese villages. The names of the streets are often as quaint as the streets themselves, or were, for they disappear and change with a dreadful frequency. One may tremble for the Travessa da Larangeira (of the Orange Tree) or for the Travessa dos Fieis de Deus (of the Faithful of God). How soon will these be called the Passage of Progress and the Street of Civilisation? But perhaps those in authority are beginning to realise that these changes often rob the city of what is more precious than much fine gold and can never be replaced.

One need not go many leagues from Lisbon to find a look of immemorial age about the life of the peasantry. One might be in pre-Roman times. The peasant in black peaked woollen cap, black shirt or blouse and knee-breeches and woollen leggings, walks slowly, goad in hand, in front of his ox-cart with its spokeless wheels of solid wood, or is jolted along as he stands against the tall crooked stakes that form the sides of the cart. The life is often very primitive. The village will have some kind of a dark taverna, where men may drink and play cards, and the shop of the grocer who is the little god and gombeen man of the village. His shop sells everything from hats and shoes and brooms to cheeses and candles and wine and bread and melons and grapes. He gives himself no airs and is always ready to serve his customers behind the counter, but he is a power in the land, often makes a considerable sum of money, and becomes an usurer, or even helps to turn the scale at an election.

The village will also, though it may not have a church, almost certainly have a prison, through the bars of which the prisoners converse with their friends or with any passer-by, as is, indeed, the case in the famous Limoeiro prison in Lisbon. The Portuguese are unfortunately notorious for their neglect of the prisons and for the astonishing way in which children and hardened criminals, political and common offenders, are herded together. And the eagerness to arrest is only equalled by the reluctance to provide food for the arrested. In fact, to give a meal to prisoners is a recognised form of private charity, and stands between them and actual starvation.

The villages themselves, their streets and houses, are often miserable enough, but they are enlivened by a large number of festas through the year. The pilgrimage or romaria is usually to some shrine in the hills or by the sea, and combines the character of a profane picnic with a religious motive. The most famous shrine is that of the Bom Jesus, near Braga, but every village has its small church or hermitage to which a yearly procession is organised. In some parts of the country the year begins with the janeiras, when groups of men go from house to house with songs special to the occasion, after the fashion of the waits in England. This may be on New Year’s Day or five days later on the Day of Kings. It ends, of course, with the festivities of Christmas, which in Portugal, where the ties of family life are strong, is observed with a peculiar devotion, and all the rites of the yule log and other ancient customs, as the consoada or odd meal to pass the time while waiting for the midnight mass, called a missa do gallo. In the towns at Christmas and at Easter the postman, the porter, the newspaper-seller, the tradesman will send you their visiting-cards (!) with their name and, printed beneath it the words, “Deseja boas festas a V. Exa. e sua Exma. familia” (“Wishes a happy fête to Your Excellency and to your most excellent family”). In return for this you are expected at Christmas to dar as broas (lit., give maize-breads—the broas eaten at Christmas in the towns are yellow cakes, in which honey, egg, almond, and orange peel predominate, and are very different from the excellent maize bread of Minho), and at Easter dar as amendoas (almonds). Between the Day of Kings and Christmas comes a long series of feast-days and pleasant customs, such as in autumn (on All Saints’ Day) the magusto, that is, a kind of picnic in which the principal feature is the roasting and eating of chestnuts not unaccompanied by wine.

But, above all, June is the month of rustic merriment, with the fêtes of St. Antony, St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter. Happily no attempts to dislodge these saints from their pre-eminence in the mind of the people have hitherto succeeded. The eve of St. John continues to be celebrated with festivities far more joyous and interesting than the bourgeois fête of Carnival, in which the real people takes little part. (At Lisbon the Carnival lasts not one day but many, and is marked by a good deal of vulgarity and absence of originality. Indeed, it would be utterly tedious but for the striking miniature peasant costumes in which it is the custom to dress up small children.) St. John the Baptist is the true popular patron saint of Portugal, and around St. John’s Eve the popular fancy has woven a rich fairy web of legend and superstition. In all the world, says a cantiga, this day is celebrated—

The very Moors observe it in Moordom—

He is set above all the other saints: there is none like him, none—

On the hills and at cross-roads and in the villages the fires of St. John glow late into the night. The saint himself comes to light them. He comes from the flowered mattos and charnecas, bringing with him a scent of rosemary—

(Rosemary is spoken of as the king of herbs—

or,

or he descends straight from heaven, where he has been engaged in leaping over the fires lit in his honour in the sky.

Or he even comes all drenched from watering beds of onions—

He is a rogue, a picaro, up to all kinds of fun in the popular fancy, which treats him with the utmost familiarity. He stands as godfather, he eats the grapes in the vineyards, he courts the girls as they go to fill their pitchers at the fountain, and they in turn crown him with flowers—

He is expected to win the hearts of the village maidens for his votaries, and smooth the course of true love, and if he fails in these duties he is treated with scant respect and even well beaten—

He is expected himself to help in building up the fire—

He even jumps over it—on a donkey—

(St. John bought a donkey to leap over the fires, and when he had leapt over them all he gave it as a present to the nuns.) Possibly the donkey enables him to go from one fire to the other, from hill to hill, and village to village.

In Beira[28] a pine tree is pulled up, a procession going out to the woods with drums and pipes. Then the smaller branches are lopped off, and as a galheiro it is decked with ferns and rosemary and other scented shrubs and so burnt. When the fire has burnt down to a heap of glowing logs and faggots children and grown persons jump over it, chanting various rhymes to bring them health and good luck through the year till next fire-tide. It does not seem to be the custom to roll a stone on to the ashes, as in the South of France, where the beard of St. John is found next morning under the stones. But, although St. John’s Eve is in Portugal recognised as essentially the night of song and love—

many superstitious beliefs are also connected with this night. Its hours between midnight and dawn are among the most precious of all the year, and no witch who has the least inkling of her business will waste a single instant of them. The dews (orvalhadas) then gathered have a special virtue, as also rosemary and other herbs and water brought from the mountains and streams. By the fountains appear enchanted Moorish maidens combing their hair with combs of gold, and many other spirits are abroad. It is the night, too, of the great blue thistles or Jerusalem artichokes (alcachofras) and other auguries of love. Next morning, on St. John’s Day, the sun dances at its rising. So a Galician romance begins with these lines—

Even at Lisbon St. John’s night is celebrated with genuine enthusiasm, and the dark blue flower of the artichoke abounds in the markets.

Such a fête is far more popular than the bull-fight, about which in Portugal there seems to be something a little artificial, with none of the fierce passion that it evokes in Spain. As a spectacular display the Portuguese touradas can be very fine, and there is no horror of killed horses, though the toreador himself has been killed before now, despite the bull’s blunted horns. The death of the well-known Portuguese bull-fighter Fernando d’Oliveira, in Lisbon’s bull-ring at the Campo Pequeno on the 12th of May, 1904, caused an immense impression. A special feature in Portugal are the touradas nocturnas (first introduced in 1880), carried on by artificial light. The more spirited among the young men looking on are keen to show their own skill and valour in the arena, and on special occasions the toreadores are of noble birth.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of the Englishman visiting Portugal, especially if he comes from Spain, where he may have imbibed the false notion that the Portuguese are an enervated and decadent people, is to find that a considerable and ever-growing number of Portuguese take part and interest in sports and games—horse-racing, regattas, lawn-tennis, football, motoring, riding, fencing, swimming. Football and lawn-tennis are fairly common, cricket is played at Oporto, and in spite of a vague belief that golf is played by the mad Englishman on horseback, his object being to hit the ball and arrive on the green before it, a golf-links is to be laid down in the grounds of the new thermal establishment, hôtel and casino at Estoril.

In Portugal there is a small and narrowing circle of old nobility, haughty and aloof, naturally growing more aloof as they have seen in recent years titles showered or money made the sole measure of respect. Lisbon, certainly, materialistic as a South American city, is at the feet of the first brazileiro who returns rich to his native land.

At Oporto, too, although the atmosphere is totally different from that of Lisbon, the enriched brazileiro plays a great part. It is, of course, principally a business city, and has something grim and forbidding, a reserve foreign to Lisbon. The large number of English wine merchants and its communications by sea prevent it, however, from being a typical Portuguese city.

This is reserved for Braga in the north, which retains a peculiar old-world flavour, and where probably there are not more than half-a-dozen foreigners. As most towns in Portugal, it is a steep city on a hill, its streets of houses of many-coloured azulejos, tiles, and washes, going up precipitously to the splendid old cathedral. The inhabitants are conservative as mountaineers, and it has the reputation of being a stronghold of the reactionaries.

The outlook on life in the North and in the South of Portugal seems often, indeed, poles asunder, the North conservative, reserved, slow; the South more expansive, liberal, and socialist, and the inhabitants of Minho will look upon the inhabitant of Algarve as little less of a stranger than the Frenchman or the Spaniard, indeed more of a stranger than his northern neighbour of Galicia. The inhabitants of the North are certainly more independent: in the South, and especially in all the district round Lisbon, political intrigue and office-hunting, and invasion of foreigners, have had a bad influence on character.

Perhaps in no region on earth is begging more general. It is not only the lamuria, the woeful ladainhas of the beggars in the streets and on the roads, with their strange tales or worn pieces of paper telling of “disastrous chances” and “moving accidents,” in spelling still more disastrous. You may say that you have no money to give or that you will not give it, but that will not move them. The shibboleth to get rid of them is Tenha paciencia (Have patience: the very last thing they require), which corresponds in effectiveness to the Perdone Vd. por Dios, the pardon asked in the name of God of Spanish beggars for giving them nothing. It means presumably that you have a hardened and obdurate heart, that you have heard it all before, and are up to all their tricks and devices: at least they immediately depart with gently muttered imprecations. These unfortunate persons are from time to time swept up promiscuously, the knaves and the deserving, by the police, and shut up in the worst cells of the Lisbon prisons till they can be shipped overseas with far less care or concern than a cargo of frozen meat. Meanwhile their confrères in higher grades of society continue in their no less degrading mendicity: for an official post, a trade concession, a favourable verdict in the law-courts, a this, a that, sinecures and trifles, in an endless intrigue to arranjar whatever necessity or ambition demands at the hands of friends, Government officials, deputies, politicians.

And the number of Government officials is enormous and increases. It is the object of all to attain this dignity. For the higher posts a University degree is a help, and many go to Coimbra solely with this object in view. (In the seventeenth century, according to the Arte de Furtar (1652), over a hundred “students” yearly succeeded in taking their degree at Coimbra in order to obtain government employment without ever having been in Coimbra.) But even the cantoneiro, who receives something under a shilling from the State to mend or omit to mend the roads of Portugal, thereby rises a step in the social scale and, if he starves, starves with authority. It is the duty of a political leader to provide places high and low for as large a number of followers as possible: herein will be gauged the measure of his success. There is thus continually a great moral (or immoral) force persistently at work to overthrow the existing Government, which is like a solitary batsman with not only the bowler—the legitimate Opposition—against him, but the whole field and all the spectators (hostile or indifferent). For the Portuguese are like the frogs, never content until King Log has been replaced by King Stork, and not very content then. For them the bird in the hand is never half so fine as the two in the bush, and they go on intriguing, insinuating, imagining novidades and betterment, both in private and public life, forgetful of their own proverb, Do mal o menos (Let sleeping dogs lie). Politics sometimes causes disturbances at Coimbra. The University, formerly Liberal, has now become Conservative, “reactionary” in its dislike of the methods of the “White Ants.”

This, the only Portuguese University, answering to Oxford and Cambridge, and old as they, is built on a hill in a delightful position above the Mondego, perhaps the most beautiful of Portugal’s many beautiful rivers, flowing through a country lovely in itself and endeared to all Portuguese by its traditions of history and legend, of which a great book might be filled. The teaching at Coimbra is apt to be too theoretical and to embrace too many fields, to the loss of exact scholarship. Many attend the lectures and rarely open a book. Literary discussions are frequent unless momentarily submerged by politics, and of course much ingenuity is always expended on skit and troça and epigram. Actual book-learning and accurate study of texts are less in favour (especially among the cabulas or calaceiros, i.e., students whose mission in life is to take the key of the fields). Rows between town (futricas) and gown are not unknown. The undergraduates are divided into caloiros (becjaune, fledgling, fresher), novatos and veteranos, and live in considerable freedom, in lodgings or hôtels, or clubbing together in republicas composed of a few students often from the same province, algarvios, minhotos, beirões.

Thus even here are maintained those distinctions between region and region, which form no little part of the attraction of Portugal for the traveller. Scarcely for the traveller in trains: if anyone wishes to write a valuable and delightful book on Spain and Portugal, let his travels be with a donkey, or on foot, selling, say, saffron or images of saints, and he will be amply rewarded for whatever little discomforts he may have to endure. The dress and gold ornaments of the peasant women of the North have been often described, and if Minho deserved visiting for nothing else it would be worth while to go there in order to see some out-of-the-way village praça (consisting often of the high road) on a market day gleaming with gold, if not purple, more than all the cohorts of Sennacherib. Some of the women are entirely covered with necklaces from neck almost to the waist, and wear one or more pairs of earrings often several inches in length. But even the boeirinha, the little ox-girl who goes dressed in scarlet and gold with her huge goad in front of the oxen, will have her gold ornament. It is in the North that the oxen wear on their heads those strange erections, often beautifully carved, called cangas. In Minho, too, chiefly survives the use of the cloak of reeds—coroça—which, according to the author of Costume of Portugal, was adopted by certain English officers who had seen it in Portugal nearly a century ago, and admired its convenience and capacity for keeping out the rain, which runs off it as water from a duck’s back: a useful property in a country like Portugal, where the autumn, winter, and spring rains are often heavy and sometimes continuous. For the Portuguese, except for some districts of Traz os Montes and Beira, winter consists of rain, not cold, and the rain at most develops a suspicion of sleet (chuva branca). But as a rule that good sun of Portugal, which has the property of warming without burning, is ever lurking round the corner, ready to appear on the first pretext.

A familiar sight in Alemtejo and the Serra da Estrella are the shepherds, the rabadãos and zagaes, dressed in brown fleeces, with their huge umbrellas of faded blue slung across their shoulders. The late Conde de Ficalho, in the first volume of A Tradição (1899), described in an interesting paper the shepherds of Alemtejo, living a nomad life from pasture to pasture, after the fashion of the Arabs, transferring their clothes and food and implements on donkeys, as in Gil Vicente. Many of the words they use are of Arabic origin, as alfeire (a flock of young lambs) or the alfirme used to tie the sheep’s legs for the shearing. They wear a pellico, i.e., a great jacket of fleeces sewn together with corriol (strips of leather) or a çamarro, which consists merely of two fleeces without sleeves. The shepherd earns a small salary (soldada) and his food (comedia), and has certain sheep of his own (his pegulhal). The shepherds of the Serra da Estrella are more stationary. Sun and wind have fanned and tanned them till they sometimes resemble nothing so much as an old dead tree-trunk scarred by lightning, and they may be seen standing motionless as a tree hour after hour in the bare Serra. They are as remote from the twentieth century as are the days of Romulus and Remus, and their customs and those of the quaint villages set in the deep ravines of the Serra are worth a careful study, belonging as they do to an age long past, before civilisation sweeps them away. Read or write the inhabitants cannot, books and newspapers are unknown; but they maintain an old-world courtesy and dignity of bearing which are attractive. They constitute one of the most characteristic parts of the Portuguese people, one of the most interesting elements in the infinite variety of Portuguese life.